Product Review: Tunze nano care magnet 220.010

Far too often the only thing ruining a lovely view of your painstakingly cared for aquarium is the unsightly presence of algae covering the sides of the tank. It is an issue that I have long had in my reef aquarium. It seems no amount of water changes, rowaphos or algae eating critters could completely irradiate the issue, and so I periodically scrub away at the algae to attempt to keep it under control.

Up until now my weapon of choice had been a combination of a Flash magic eraser and a the Vertex cleaner-mag simplex. This actually works well for the most part, the vertex is good at scraping off your everyday algal growth, and the magic eraser works well on the tougher stuff. The use of the eraser does however involve me manually scrubbing away with my hand inside the tank, and it being a small tank (22 litres) I inevitably knock things over and disturb the inhabitants more than my liking.

So when I came across the Tunze nano care magnet 220.010 I was intrigued to find out more. Differing from traditional algae magnets which employ a velcro like surface to scrub algae from the tank walls, the Tunze magnet incorporates two plastic blades to do the work. The result of this configuration is regions of high pressure on two very slim contact points on the aquarium glass. The magnet itself is one of the stronger ones i’ve come across, and this coupled with the twin blade arrangement makes for a very effective scraper.

Upon first use of this scraper I could immediately tell that this was something a bit special, well as special as it gets in the world of algae magnets anyway. The blades worked fantastically to rid my aquarium glass of all traces of algae, dealing with the easy stuff and the super tough algae that I hadn’t been able to shift for months using my old technique. The design allows you to scrape beyond the sand line, as there is virtually no chance of sand getting stuck in the slim contact points of blades, meaning I could finally get to all the brown algae that had built up just below the sand on the front of the tank.

Another plus of this magnet is that the edge of the blades are bevelled, allowing for the cleaning on those tricky moulded corners that are found on many modern aquariums, including my own. I am not sure how suitable this magnet would be for acrylic aquaria, the blades are plastic so i’d be tempted to say they would be ok to use on acrylic, I have not tried this myself though.

All in all I think this algae magnet is fantastic, it is quick and effective and will allow you too remove all that nuisance algae from your aquarium walls without having the disturb the inhabitants too much at all, I would highly recommend it.